This is the world we live in,
And these are the hands we're given.

I know
Not these my hands
And yet I think there was
A woman like me once had hands
Like these.

Old hands soil, it seems, whatever they caress, but they too have their beauty when they are joined in prayer. Young hands were made for caresses and the sheathing of love. It is a pity to make them join too soon.

Stranger to love and the benevolent
hand of age......
History has recorded on our papery hearts
By the reed
And each partition of the reed
Complains of the Masnavi of our groans: ...........??
The lines in your hands
(these winding roads)
Is familiar to my eye.
Believe me
The lines in your hand
Are more familiar to me than my own lines...
Ah O friend...
They buried us together in the grave
A thousand years ago,

All my parents gave me was their fumbly hands: I got their hands inside me to this day.

You could fall suddenly into the void the dead go to: I would be comforted if you would bequeath me your hands. Only your hands would continue to exist, detached from you, unexplainable like those of marble gods turned into the dust and the limestone of their own tomb. They would survive your actions, the wretched bodies they caressed. They would no longer serve as intermediaries between you and things: they themselves would be changed into things. Innocent again now, since you would no longer be there to turn them into your accomplices, sad like greyhounds without masters, disconcerted like archangels to whom no god gives orders, your useless hands would rest on the lap of darkness. Your open hands incapable of giving or taking the slightest joy would have let me slump like a broken doll. I kiss the wrists of these indifferent hands you will no longer pull away from mine: I stroke the blue artery, the blood column that once spurted continuously like a fountain from the ground of your heart. With little sobs of contentment, I rest my head like a child between these palms filled with the stars, the crosses, the precipices of my previous fate.

The poem is in my hands, and can run stories through her hands.

Chapter Ten The Threads in
My Hands THE YEAR 1993 did not start well. In fact, New Year’s Day found me ill at ease, hurting, coughing, and feverish, on an airplane bringing my family back a day early from Miami.

I am murdering me, where I kneeled at your kiss.
I am pushing knives through the hands
that created two into one.
Our hands do not bleed at this, they lie still in their dishonor.

"This moment in time," (She said.) It doesn't belong to you," (She said,) It belongs to me, And your little boy and your little girl, And the one hand clapping: Where on your palm is my little line, When you're written in mine As an old memory?